


And We’re Back to School, Apparently

by thatsrightdollface



Series: Seven Worlds (Crossovers for the Umbrella Academy Team) [1]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - X-Men Fusion, Canon-Typical Violence, Crossover, Finding a new home, Five and Luther are twins in this, Five is a good brother, Gen, Prejudice/Injustice Against Mutants Discussed, Reginald Hargreeves is a creep who experiments on/studies mutants here, terrible parenting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-02
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:07:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26253886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: Luther Hargreeves and his twin brother arrived at the Xavier Institute for Higher Learning in the dead of night, during the sort of thunderstorm that seemed to shake the world.X-Men Crossover.  Mostly a hypothetical post-canon version of X-Men Evolution to be honest, but I pick-and-choose some stuff from other places too.
Relationships: Allison Hargreeves/Luther Hargreeves, Kitty Pryde & Kurt Wagner, Number Five | The Boy & Luther Hargreeves, near the end - Relationship, with descriptions of future
Series: Seven Worlds (Crossovers for the Umbrella Academy Team) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1907311
Comments: 10
Kudos: 63





	And We’re Back to School, Apparently

**Author's Note:**

> Hi!!! Thank you for reading, and I'm very, very sorry for anything I might've messed up. I wrote seven fairytales for the Umbrella Academy team last year, so this year I thought it might be interesting to write seven crossovers with other superhero things??? This is the first one! 
> 
> I hope you've been staying safe and doing as well as possible.

Luther Hargreeves and his twin brother arrived at the Xavier Institute for Higher Learning in the dead of night, during the sort of thunderstorm that seemed to shake the world. They pulled up in a slick car with the fanciest leather seats Luther had ever seen — they were buttery under his hand, and there was a little fridge for drinks and a panel of buttons that could supposedly turn the thing into a plane, or a rocket launcher, or a portal to deep space. A TV unfolded down from the ceiling, too. Luther’s brother flicked suspicious eyes over all of it, huffing to himself, shaking his leg up and down like he was preparing to blink them both away from there at the first hint of trouble. Five was like that, but Luther was just... God, Luther was so tired. 

Five refused to go back to what his name had been, before the man who experimented on mutants had claimed them as his children. He said that the guy he’d used to be was irrelevant, but he didn’t say it the way a brooding superhero-type might in a movie. It was casual, you know? Just a dismissal, like Luther’s brother wanted to swat off his old name — their old parents, who had sold them away — like flicking a little fuzz from his coat. Luther had been “One,” when they were in Father’s care. Father had liked arranging his mutant collections into teams of seven. 

Honestly, Luther’d been glad to hear people calling him by his birth name, again. This probably-also-a-spaceship car had appeared to pick him and Five up from the hospital... to pay their bills, to officially meet the Xavier School’s newest recruits, to make sure they got to campus safe. Luther had watched its headlights drift through the rain, shivery and ethereal and too good to be true. They reminded him of a swinging lighthouse beam out over some restless ocean. 

The car was driven by a short, earnest woman in a burgundy sweater, hair pulled up in a bouncy ponytail. She introduced herself to Luther and Five as both “Kitty Pryde” and “Shadowcat,” as easy as anything. She told them she could phase through stuff — sliding her hand past a door, maybe, or dripping into the floor like a ghost. Luther had seen Shadowcat on TV before, actually. She was pretty famous. He’d sort of expected her to show up in her yellow X-Men uniform, with the snappy belt and the boots, but... no. It _was_ pretty late at night, by the time the hospital consented to release Luther and Five into the Xavier School’s care officially. It sounded like there’d been a little pushback. 

Shocking, huh?

Shadowcat yawned into her arm, and signed a ton of liability paperwork, and told Luther and Five it was so, so good to meet them both. She shook their hands and offered them bags of possible clothes to change into before “heading home.” Luther wondered if she was going to offer him an image inducer. A popular theory online involved Shadowcat’s best friend using one of those, sometimes, when he wasn’t X-Men-ing around places — Nightcrawler, he was called, though Shadowcat called him “Kurt,” like, “Kurt made dinner for you both... we thought I’d be able to get you back much sooner, hah. We can pick something up on the way home, if you don’t want to wait. Kurt’ll understand.”

Nightcrawler — Kurt Wagner — was furry and blue, with pointed ears and a jagged, fang-y grin. He had a prehensile tail, and... and legs with an extra joint, if Luther remembered right... and a shifting shadow that hung over him all the time. His eyes tended to seem sort of jaunty and laughing, when people caught photos of him for the paper, but his mutation had also left them glowing and yellow. Nightcrawler was a teleporter, like Five — he was probably going to end up being one of their teachers. Shadowcat, too. 

Luther’s original mutation had been invisible, like Five’s. He’d just been strong, unnaturally strong, and he’d only noticed it when he started accidentally ripping his school locker off its hinges, and punching through the wall when he was just trying to brace himself, and... uh... the sort of thing that got people who were interested in mutants, like Father, knocking on his birth parents’ door. Father came to collect Luther at school, and Five tried to blink him away. They didn’t get far enough. 

No one had had to even know Five was a mutant at all, before then. His mutation never snuck out without his control anymore, the way Luther’s did — he could’ve stayed, you know. Incognito. Potentially loved, kept safe by their birth parents. But he hadn’t. When Luther said he felt sort of responsible for what happened next, Five scoffed at him. Called him a big dummy. 

It had been some long years, taken in by Father. Luther’d only had a little time with his strength before it became someone else’s to control. To study, to test, to push to its breaking point. And, well. Luther’s mutation had _used_ to be invisible. Now, though... 

Now, he would’ve loved to know how Nightcrawler managed it. Did he carry a discreet, spy-grade image inducer every time he went out for groceries? Like Black Widow in a Safeway. Or what? Could Luther learn to be comfortable with his own changed self, like Nightcrawler seemed on all those X-Men missions, however many people were staring at him? 

Probably if Shadowcat had just casually offered Luther an image inducer, that would’ve been good enough prompting for Five to get them out of there, careful as he was. Who knew if this was _really_ Shadowcat, anyway? Who knew what this particular image inducer would be programmed to get Luther looking like? Luther didn’t care much for the way some of the patients and nurses and all were watching him, but Five grinned as they passed by. Waved ruefully, flashing the brand on his pale, still slightly blood-splattered arm. Father’s seal. 

Five had freshly-bandaged wounds across his neck and oozing between his fingers, too, from what he’d had to do to get his power dampening collar off back with the man who experimented on mutants. It had been messy, but they’d escaped. The X-Men were gonna be investigating that old lab, that steel hole underground, those gothic-type spires looking so lost in the middle of Texas. 

Over the phone, the X-Men had promised they’d get all Father’s other collected mutants out as soon as possible. And then Five had blinked them here, to New York, before he was so woozy with blood loss Luther finally managed to drag him to a hospital without hurting him worse. 

“It’s good to meet you, too,” Luther murmured, looking at Shadowcat’s sneakers and reminding himself to smile. 

“Any more paperwork?” Five asked. “Or are we part of your little club, now?”

And then they’d driven a long way, from where the tangle of smoky city roads drifted into long, meandering highways. The smeary golden lights were swallowed up by walls of dark trees on either side of the road. Dark trees and so much rain. Luther had fumbled around for a soda from the mini-fridge in the back of the car. He tried his best to make polite chit-chat with Shadowcat as they drove, talking about what books and sci-fi films he’d liked before... well, before. If things had been different, he and Five would’ve both graduated high school by now. Luther could remember the book he’d been reading when his parents handed him away. It had been in his backpack, left abandoned on the high school hallway floor. He asked Shadowcat if there might possibly be a copy of it in the Xavier School’s library, and she said, “If there wasn’t before, I’ll order one,” meeting his eyes in the rear-view mirror. 

Shadowcat told Luther and Five about what their curriculum would be like, at the Xavier School — how they’d hopefully learn to manage their superhuman abilities, and possibly... if they wanted... use them to rescue and look after others. She talked about electives, like theater and ceramics, and about an exchange program to Asgard that still had a couple openings for next semester. 

And eventually they arrived, like I said, in a smothering rain. Nightcrawler and another of the X-Men — Storm, or Ororo Munroe — met them at the door. Storm lifted her hands like she was raising gauzy, invisible theater curtains, and an arched tunnel opened up through the downpour. They trooped in, splashing through puddles but with their hair completely dry. Storm held out a hand for the car keys, and Shadowcat passed them over, said, “Good luck... let us know if it turns out you could use backup?”

“Will do. I’ll say hi to Namor for you, too.”

“Ugh. If you want to.”

As Storm drove off behind them, Luther heard a crackling, splintering sound, and the car was gone. 

“She has a meeting in Atlantis,” Shadowcat explained. “They’re in a different time zone, see.”

The school grounds had been dripping with life around this mansion, with huge ancient trees and a soggy baseball court, with swirling-patterned flower gardens and a wrought-iron gate that swung open when Shadowcat muttered the password into a little computer screen. It had been something about “Cyclops can’t take a joke,” this time, it sounded like... which sort of made Luther wonder what it had been before. Poor Cyclops. 

“Hi there, all of you,” Nightcrawler offered, now, fangs glinting in the entryway light. “I hope Kitty’s driving hasn’t scared you off yet!” His tail twisted behind him, pointed into an arrow at the very tip the way some people drew demon tails. He had a small gold crucifix hanging around his neck.

Shadowcat shot Luther a playfully exasperated look. “I _used_ to be a pretty... erratic? Driver. But not anymore. Right, Luther? Five?”

“Right,” Luther answered. 

It was while they were sitting at one of what looked like several family-style dinner tables, eating what Nightcrawler had prepared for them hours ago, just microwaved a bit, that Luther first met _her_. Allison. The Rumor. He didn’t know her name at first, of course, or the ways she struggled with her mutation. He couldn’t have guessed that she’d ever be willing to hold his hand, someday, or dance with him on the back porch outside the school, under a thousand unseeing stars. In time, Allison would sit reading with Luther for hours, and sneak him out to get milkshakes with or without an image inducer on. In time, Allison would run through active battlefields to Luther’s side, when some bad guy or another knocked him out. She made sure they both got home safe, again and again. 

But at first, Luther just saw Allison come hurrying up to the table, grabbing Shadowcat by the arm. She held herself like an actress, he thought, and looked exactly his age, with clever eyes and soft brown hands and a very fashionable jacket with one of those black and yellow “X” pins near the collar. Luther caught himself wondering what it would be like to make her smile. She was wearing a kind of lipstick he later learned was called “Gossip.” A bit of a joke, considering her mutation. Allison could “rumor” anything to life, get it? “I heard a rumor,” she said, and then whatever it was that rumor came true.

Allison was annoyed, when they first met. She told Shadowcat the school’s underground sensors were picking up “interference from _that guy_ , again. He’s on his way,” and Shadowcat groaned. Heaved herself up to her feet and smacked Nightcrawler gently on the back. He was collapsed forward across the table, at the moment, head in his arms. 

“Up and at ‘em, Kurt,” Shadowcat said. 

“ _That guy_?” Five repeated.

“That guy,” Allison confirmed. Then she did a double-take. “You’re new here,” she realized, looking from Luther to Five. She didn’t seem uncomfortable, glancing up and down Luther’s huge arms, across that torso he’d been assured was “quite inhuman” and up to his face. Maybe she was even looking at him kindly, like people had sometimes in high school before he’d started tearing textbooks apart without meaning to. “Welcome! Honestly, welcome. I wouldn’t worry about any of this until the ground starts shaking, personally. We can handle it, tonight.”

“Wait...” Luther started. “ _Is_ the ground gonna start shaking?”

“Probably not,” Allison said. “But if it does, it still won’t be anywhere near as weird as the time this school got moved to Limbo.” That was meant to be encouraging, Luther knew. Something about Allison was oddly familiar. Luther felt like he would get a lot of her jokes. 

“I can still blink us away from here,” Five muttered, darkly. But there was an interest in his face that meant maybe he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to yet. The Xavier School was safer than anywhere they’d been in years, but it was still — well, um — the _Xavier School_. It wasn’t perfect, and Professor X was a complicated, contradictory man... a man Luther would want to follow with absolute trust, in time, but who Five would always eye dubiously at best. There was a lot they’d still have to figure out about where they wanted to stand in this world.

But... all that said... for the moment, Five _was_ curious about what the X-Men were planning to do about “that guy.” Luther could tell. 

Luther and Five already had a nameplate waiting on the door of their new dorm room, it turned out. They had new toothbrushes in an X-Men Annual Scavenger Hunt 1998 mug by the sink, and empty bookshelves ready to be filled, and sheets that smelled like they’d been washed just that morning. 


End file.
